This disclosure is directed to method and system for downloading a file from common recipient devices in proximity.
If a user receives an email with an attachment file on the user's device, the user needs to download the file on the device to view its content. In many situations, there are people in close proximity that might have received the same content for various reasons, including, they are part of the same group, such as a social group or a family group, or they work in same office. Another example may be a high interest level on the same content/topic, for example if two people are passionate about music and are always keen to stay up to-date with the latest hits or news on their favorite artists.
In these situations, the nearby device users each must using data bandwidth to download the content thus spending time, money and data usage. Each user receives the file to download as part of the group communication and every recipient downloads the attachment and stores in locations only accessible to the same user.
There are existing applications which allows users to share and receive data from devices without using any data bandwidth and which are quite fast. However, the major drawback of these existing systems is that they require user intervention of both the sender and receiver.
Although this system recognizes the available devices in the network based on some criteria for sharing content, these systems require a push from the sender and then choosing a receiver.
In P2P, there is central indexing server which tracks all its users, connected devices and files stored that are ready for share. Once a user connects to the server, the server points to the connected device and the file is downloaded. In this model, the server does not store the file but just stores the address of the connected devices and the stored file.
In downloading a file using torrent, the user searches about the file or someone sends the torrent file to the user. The user adds the torrent file to the torrent client. Reading the file, the torrent client connects to the torrent server and finds the address of the device which contains that particular file and the download happens from that device to the user device.
Typically, a user creates an attachment file as part of email and creates metadata for that attachment and the attachment is stored at an email server. The attachment metadata is sent to the email recipients. The email recipients referring to the attachment metadata connect to the email server to be authenticated and to download the email file. The email server also tracks who all have downloaded the file and then others can download from that device. Drawing a parallel analogy to torrent here, the email server is torrent indexing server, the attachment metadata is a torrent file and the devices that have downloaded the file are peer devices. When another user tries to download the file from server, server replies that the file can be downloaded from a peer.